[tei-council] Consistency in hyphenation

[Martin Holmes]

On 13-06-22 01:35 AM, Lou Burnard wrote:
> On 22/06/13 06:50, Martin Holmes wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I'm in a pedantic mood, and I'm noticing that some chapters have the
>> attributive adjectival phrase:
>>
>> 	any TEI-conformant text
>>
>> while others have no hyphen:
>>
>> 	a TEI conformant document
>>
>> I believe we should be consistent, and the hyphenated form is better for
>> attributive contexts (not necessarily for predicative). So I propose to
>> add hyphens in these contextsor r
>
> we should certainly be consistent : i think the difference between
> contexts is less important. Would we hyphenate eg "TEI conformance (is a
> good thing)" too? my feeling is no.

No; the normal convention is that the hyphen appears when the phrase is 
used as an attributive adjective. Compare:

His novel was soon to be rejected.
His soon-to-be-rejected novel was not worth the paper it was written on.

Or, even more straightforward:

He was a well-known gambler.
His gambling was well known.

Wikipedia addresses this:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_modifier#Hyphenation_of_elements>

But it's another case where, because we haven't adopted a specific style 
guide, we're stuck making up the rules as we go along. I could do a 
quick survey of the various styleguides on this.

> I see you've also managed to find and fix numerous typos which have been
> lurking undetected in MS for an embarassingly long time.... chapeau! as
> we say en france

I made myself read a chapter I confess I'd never read before, the MS 
Description chapter. We could each do this once in a while, and catch a 
bunch of stuff like this. I'm surprised any of it got past Jens's 
mammoth proofing effort last year, but when there's a large amount of 
Latin and other languages floating about in the text, it's difficult to 
keep your focus.